Population Control

Can we find our way back to living in harmony with nature?

Do populations in nature self-regulate? I believe so, and have adduced evidence from field studies and from computer simulations. Indigenous human societies, too, effectively kept our numbers in check for our first million years during which people were part of nature. Now people have moved on from nature, and we’ve lost the intuitions that helped us to regulate our numbers. Do we need a global government that surveils our bedrooms and mandates selective abortions? No — this is a cure worse than the disease. What we need is a return to the attitudes and sensitivities that enables us to live in harmony with Gaia.

---

In the 21st century, I have written that ecosystems are self-regulating— not via some invisible hand that creates homeostasis out of selfishness, but by evolved individual behaviors that dampen population explosions and prevent population crashes. 

Sixty years ago, a British naturalist with far more cred than I’ll ever have said the same thing, and he was canceled by an academic establishment that brooks no dissent. They theorize that selfish genes are the be-all and end-all of evolution, and they ruled the province of evolutionary science with an iron fist through the second half of the 20th century. From their perspective, fitness consists in leaving more offspring than your neighbors. The idea that natural selection could lead to voluntary limits on reproduction is (for them) a non-starter.

And yet, population control is an essential feature of ecology. The truth is that birth control and “death control” in the form of lifespans limited by aging are crucial to the very survival of ecosystems. (The origin of aging as a mechanism of population stabilization has been the subject of my principal contribution to the literature of evolutionary ecology. My book)

The mechanisms of population control in animal species are widely studied and discussed — though it is taboo to point out that they obviously violate the “selfish gene” paradigm. The most common mechanism is territoriality. A bird family or a pack of wolves will hold its territory and prevent others from encroaching, thus preserving a generous food supply for itself and its kin, while keeping out the competition. 

It is easy for Darwinian fundamentalists to understand the motivation of the selfish, hoarding behavior. What they can’t explain is why other birds or wolves go along with it. Why aren’t there more fights to the death, considering that 100% of a challenger’s Darwinian fitness hangs in the balance?

But birds and even tigers seldom fight. There is a legendary study by Stewart and Aldrich [1951], who found that for every mating pair of songbirds in a nest, there are a dozen or more birds cruising the periphery, waiting in the wings, so to speak, for a vacancy so they can build a nest. Somehow, the birds have all agreed to keep the breeding population constant, generation after generation, even as the non-breeding population waxes and wanes and even crashes. It’s a marvelously effective system for ecosystem homeostasis, but the mystery is how and why the birds agree to be bound by the rules. In particular, the majority of birds submit without protest to a convention that has consigned them to a Darwinian dead end.

Lori Stevens [1989] described beetles that cannibalizing their young under conditions of overcrowding. 

In a famous experiment with Mouse Utopia, John Calhoun provided everything that his rats (later mice) needed to live — plenty of water and food, exercise wheels and playgrounds, in an environment free of disease and predators. Only living space was limited. Time after time, he watched the population expand exponentially, until these highly social animals became highly anti-social. They fought, bit and scratched, failed to protect their young, and eventually the entire colony collapsed to zero — all while the experimenters continued to provide an abundance of food for everyone.

Animals understand ecology

Back in 1968, just before it became taboo to write such a paper, Stonybrook ecologist Larry Slobodkin wrote “How to be a Predator”. The title was ironic, because his conclusion — backed by both mathematical models and common sense — is that the most important thing for a predator is to keep the population of prey near its maximum. It is tempting for any individual to take more than his share of prey, to use the extra energy to create more offspring, and thus to advance the interest of his “selfish genes”. But what if he succeeds? Then his offspring increase exponentially, and they come to dominate the predator population in just a few short generations. Then they find themselves competing with their own greedy cousins for a dwindling prey population. Mass starvation is unavoidable.

Can we be surprised that evolution learned this lesson early and often? Any population of animals that shares a common food source is forced to cooperate in order to keep their numbers under control. Failure to obey is punished by extinction, and extinction is the ne plus ultra of natural selection. This is a language that even neo-Darwinist dogmatists should understand. But many of them consider every evolved altruistic behavior to be a deep mystery.

Early humans

Curiously, the means by which human groups maintained population homeostasis for our first million years on the planet are less well understood. If you ask an anthropologist how indigenous cultures kept their populations in check, he will probably answer, “war”. No doubt, there is plenty of carnage in human history as we know it, but the history we know is less than 1% of man’s tenure on the planet. We know precious little about earlier human cultures, and in the absence of specific knowledge my guess would be that humans, like animals, had instincts that told them when reproduction would be counterproductive for the community. Various tribal cultures all had unwritten rules about who could reproduce, when, and how much. Human groups are imaginative beyond our imaginings, and it is likely (IMHO) that each tribe had its unique traditions and covenants that contributed to population stability without excessive violence. 

I’m personally attracted to the idea that before Columbus, indigenous Americans had learned to be stewards of nature, to manage prolific ecosystems that provided their needs without the monoculture and livestock technologies that predominated in Eurasia. [Charles C. Mann]

Whatever it was that enabled tribal populations to thrive in harmonious relationship to diverse ecosystems, this knowledge has been lost, along with the motivation and the will to maintain harmony with nature as a condition of human existence. Human population is out of control these last several hundred years. Combined with an exploitative mentality and industrial means of destruction, exponential population growth is an existential threat to humanity. But there is no way out of this dilemma that does not violate our deeply held convictions about human rights and autonomy over our own bodies. Or so it seemed…

Eugenics

In Britain and America in the early 20th century, liberal intellectuals all received Darwin’s memo about the necessary pruning of the weak, and they realized that that was no longer morally acceptable to our civilized sensibilities. How then to preserve and even improve the human gene pool? Eugenics was part of the credo of the time: the state must take control, and apply meritocratic principles to determine who is allowed to have children. Then Hitler came along and gave eugenics a bad name. 

In the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome warned us of an impending “population bomb”, timed to destroy humanity via starvation before the century was out. Population control again became thinkable. Then Mao tried it, with results that were wildly unpopular, even in the context of a docile Chinese culture that was conditioned to obey central authority. China is living today with the legacy of the one child policy. There are not enough women for the men who wish to marry, and it is projected that there will be not enough working people to support the generation coming to retirement age. But the results of the one-child experiment were not all bad. A generation of Chinese had excess income, in part because they did not have large families to support, and this contributed to an unparalleled wave of prosperity that lifted a billion people out of poverty. Freed from having to grow rice for a burgeoning population, peasants migrated to the cities to build an industrial powerhouse. 

Some of us trust government more than others, but almost everyone is horrified at the prospect of a technocratic committee deciding who is allowed to have children, and when, and how many.

I like to tell the story of Sir Ronald Fisher (1890-1962). He was a brilliant man who integrated Mendel’s genetics with Darwin’s selection to create a mathematical theory of evolution that stands to this day. And along the way, he contributed most of the statistical methodology that is widely used in biology today, and also in medicine, astronomy, paleontology, etc.

What motivated Fisher more than anything was a passion for eugenics. He was convinced that his own peers of the British aristocracy were not having enough children, while the hoi-polloi were having too many, and that British culture would not survive the dilution of the gene pool. He fathered eight children. Fisher wrote just one book; the first half has served as text for a quantitative theory of evolution, and the second half is an embarrassing, racist screed.

Fisher’s evolutionary theory was the selfish gene. The term was not coined until Richard Dawkins wrote a popular book 40 years later, but the ideas were all Fisher’s. Fisher’s evolution is sometimes called “population genetics” or “neo-Darwinism”. It is a paradigm that turned evolution into a testable, quantitative theory; but it also became a rigid dogma that still holds the field back today. The Chinese translation of my book is called 无私的基因, The Unselfish Gene.

Tragedy of the Commons

In 1968, ecology professor Garrett Hardin captured the spirit of his time in a Science Magazine essay called The Tragedy of the Commons. In a mythic village where everyone’s sheep graze together on an ample acreage of lush grass, each farmer is motivated to increase his own herd size. And when the grass becomes thin and the sheep grow leaner, the motivation to increase each farmer’s individual share only grows stronger. The situation quickly escalates to the point where all the sheep starve.

Therefore (Hardin concluded), all it takes is for everyone to peacefully pursue his own enlightened self-interest, and the human experiment will proceed to a suicidal end. 

How many people can the Earth support?

I don’t pretend to know the answer, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tries to calculate a number. I have written about the possibility that transformative energy technologies are already known to some subset of the human population. Even without free energy, we might cram our apartment buildings ever higher and denser and grow hydroponic soy protein in our photovoltaic deserts. You might agree with me that this isn’t the world we want to bequeath our grandchildren. 

Laws restricting abortion have inflamed some of the most divisive passions in American politics. Can you imagine if the Federal government tried to mandate abortion? You would have the entire Woke establishment and a feminist army lining up alongside the Pope and the Christian Right to say NO! 

But we live on a finite planet. 

Optimism

With clear, logical reasoning, it’s easy to convince ourselves that overpopulation is a hopeless problem. So, let me offer some fuzzy, illogical reasoning…

Urgency — It’s long past time to prevent damage to global ecosystems — we must begin ASAP to pick up our garbage and allow them to recover. We can do this much more quickly than we can reduce the world’s population. For example, Amory Lovins has showed us how to do this in the energy sector. We need to rein in the excesses of capitalism in externalizing the costs of doing business. The principal obstacle is the extent to which “democratic” governments have been captured by corporate influence. Our failure to prevent toxic waste and wasteful consumption is a failure of democracy, not a problem of overpopulation. 

The Malthusian death spiral — 200 years after Malthus, world population has grown eightfold, but we are better able to feed the world than we were in 1800. We have inexcusable starvation in large regions of the world, but this is a tragic result of inequitable distribution and imperial exploitation, not a technical problem of food production. Counting just the grains that are stored in mega-silos and sold on world markets, we produce almost twice as many calories as 8 billion people need.

There is a myth that the “green revolution” has saved humanity from starvation. But mechanized agriculture, chemical pesticides, and factory farms are efficient only when accounted in dollars. Agribusiness has optimized for yield per man-hour, not yield per acre. Small farmers using traditional and sustainable methods could further increase yields. [Vandana Shiva]

The win-win path to population control — In Russia, Japan, and Italy, fertility is below replacement, and that is concerning to people who cherish the rich cultural traditions of these nations. Some of the reason is despair for the future. But the most promising reason for declining fertility is that people feel secure in their future and fulfilled in their lives outside the family.

Fertility explodes in controlled, exploited populations. Fertility declines when people have a social safety net to care for them in their old age. Fertility declines in stable, prosperous economies. Fertility declines when women have fulfilling careers outside the home. Bill Ryerson has devoted his career to slowing population growth by educating and empowering women. 

Let’s continue to work toward more livable communities, especially for women, and the “population problem” just might take care of itself.